title: [Tendency of concrete interpretation of the "Anna threefold" fantasy in "late" mothers and in the area of reproduction technology].
abstract: Leonardo da Vinci's painting "The Virgin and Child with St. Anne" ("Anna Selbdritt" = Anne Threefold) is used here to explain and illustrate early infantile female fantasies deriving from the narcissistic desire to correspond to the omnipotent mother and infantile ideas about the imaginary child. The painting is analyzed as an image of the central female fantasy in need of development. It is argued, on the basis of observation of the psychodynamic singularities found among a clinical sample of "late mothers" and their "planned" children that among women with a personal history of disturbance of the development of female identity there can be an acting out and concretization of these early fantasies during a narcissistic crisis with the fulfillment of an urgent desire for children. The central female developmental phases are, as it were, subverted. This "bypassing" of a developmentally adequate transformation of early infantile fantasies involves not only a disturbance in the relationship to the mother's own child and to her mother but also an impairment of the sense of female and maternal identity and of the ability to establish heterosexual relationships. There is also discussion of the degree to which reproductive medicine encourages and strengthens female willingness to concretize untransformed infantile fantasies and thus threatens to become a tempting instrument of power over more than just a woman's body.
authors.affiliation: Psychosomatischen Abteilung, Universitätskrankenhauses Eppendorf.
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Berger
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D003674:Defense Mechanisms; D005201:Fantasy; D005260:Female; D005783:Gender Identity; D006801:Humans; D008423:Maternal Age; D008425:Maternal Behavior; D009034:Mother-Child Relations; D011247:Pregnancy; D018566:Pregnancy, High-Risk; D011574:Psychoanalytic Theory
vernacular_title: Zur Tendenz der Konkretisierung des "Anna-selbdritt"-Phantasmas bei "späten" Müttern und im Bereich der Reproduktionstechnologie.